"Meaning" in music versus the way music means

[Larry Kart]

Perhaps interesting (albeit chewy) passage from an article by Charles Rosen. He begins by quoting a passage from musicologist Laurence Dreyfus's book "Bach and the Patterns of Invention" on a hallmark of Enlightenment aesthetics, which was meant to apply to all the arts and which was ill-suited to Bach's typically "learned," artfully complex, and highly detailed music.

"The New Enlightened aesthetic was also a theory [that required] art to be produced and judged according to how well it offered direct access to the mental representations that lay behind the work, its signifying ideas.... Words, music, gestures, pictures -- all were there not to draw attention to themselves but to be as transparent as possible...."

Rosen adds: "Any such theory spells big trouble for music.... For one thing, the principle of transparency is more problematic for music than for any of the other arts.... [T]he sheer breadth of detail within a musical experience are always far out of proportion to any underlying affect that can be proposed for it. Whereas a painting can be seen to resemble an observed view, or the plot of a novel can seem to replicate a realistic experience, the phenomenon of music itself does not by and large resemble the experience it may wish to convey.... [My emphasis]

[Chuck Nessa]

And that's exactly why he never had a record in the top 40.